Today’s interview is with Toni Keskinen, who is the Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer & Chairman at 180ops, a revenue intelligence platform built on account-based customer data that empowers B2B businesses to drive revenue growth, optimize operations, and enhance customer lifetime value. Toni joins me today to discuss five different blind spots that he believes many organisations suffer from when it comes to understanding their customers, driving growth, and where they should focus their resources, particularly in sales and account management.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – SRM and why it matters to growth and customer experience – Interview with Ryan Hamilton – and is number 548 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Toni:

• Blind spots speak to opportunity.
• Offering penetration as a CX measure is completely missed.
• Blind Spot 1: Offering Penetration: Companies systematically miss measuring and managing how deeply customers use their various offerings.
  • Companies often miss customers with strong growth potential because no one is responsible for systematically growing their offering penetration.
• Blind Spot 2: Strategic Segmentation and Portfolio Goal: Large B2B companies with many SKUs and service types often lack a holistic view of customer segments and their commercial value.
  • By analyzing value chains and combining offering-level data with industry classifications, companies can define a “portfolio goal” for each customer, showing their total potential.
  • This approach helps key account managers prioritize efforts and identify where the most significant monetary value lies.
• Blind Spot 3: Segmentation and Future Growth Possibilities: Overlapping and strategic segmentation is crucial for corporate management to understand market priorities and maximize asset value (products/services).
• Blind Spot 4: Upselling, Renewal, Cross-selling, and New Customer Acquisition: Management often lumps these activities together in CRM, missing that cross-selling creates new value and deeper relationships, while upselling and renewal are more about maintenance.
  • Incentive models should differentiate between these activities to drive new value creation rather than just repetitive renewals.
• Blind Spot 5: Strategic Influence of Offerings: Different offerings play different roles in the customer relationship (e.g., “door openers,” “halo effects,” “anchor roles”) and understanding these roles allows for systematic growth strategies.
• 180ops helps companies gain situational awareness and new insights from data, particularly by highlighting the “Pareto principle” (80/20 rule) in lost customers with high potential.
• The goal is to bridge silos, provide a strategic view of the market (bottom-up and outside-in), and improve average sales performance by guiding salespeople on where to focus their time.
• The good news is that “there’s gold everywhere” within existing customer bases, representing a world of untapped potential.
• Toni’s best advice: If everything is silo-based and offering-based and business unit-based, you never see the big picture, and you’re just creating blind spots and you are looking at things in too narrow a way, never realizing that you may have competitive advantages that some of your customers are already leveraging, but you are unaware of them yourself.
• Toni’s Punk CX brand: Microsoft and Google

About Toni

Toni is a seasoned business leader with 25+ years of experience in customer experience, insights, and market intelligence for B2B companies. As co-founder of 180ops, a game-changing account-based customer data and revenue intelligence platform, he empowers businesses to see what others can’t by turning complexity into clarity. A recognized author and speaker, he helps companies and people make smarter decisions, drive growth, and unlock their full potential.

Check out 180ops, and do connect with Toni on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash